Intel CPUs Massive Security Flaw issue
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AMD CPUs are impacted by this just as much as Intel CPUs.
AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel
page table isolation feature protects against. The AMD microarchitecture
does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that
access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode
when that access would result in a page fault.The threat and the response to the three variants differ by microprocessor company, and AMD is not susceptible to all three variants. Due to differences in AMD's architecture, we believe there is a near zero risk to AMD processors at this time. We expect the security research to be published later today and will provide further updates at that time.
Howerver, ARM prcessors are affected:
ARM, whose chip designs are widely used in cell phones and other devices, confirmed some of its chip architectures are affected, including some of its Cortex-A processors. "This method requires malware running locally and could result in data being accessed from privileged memory," ARM said in a statement to Axios. "Our Cortex-M processors, which are pervasive in low-power, connected IoT devices, are not impacted."
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@KOM:
AMD's performance is so far behind that even 30% slower the Intel is still faster and I suspect they have their own issues.
From what I have read, AMD's latest Threadripper CPUs are giving Intel a run for their money, and they're cheaper. As for issues, unless you have something concrete then you can't really make that claim. I've seen others saying the same thing on other tech forums, that this Intel bug is bad but AMD might maybe perhaps possibly have something as bad or worse. It's pure FUD.
Sorry to disagree
Threadripper does nearly half the work clock per cycle of an Intel plus they run much hotter and are less power efficient
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This was true 15 years ago, can't believe they are still the same.
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Here is 1 example the AMD has 8 cores 16 threads Intel 4 core 8 threads
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/amd-ryzen-benchmarks,review-4232.html
I did not reed the post in detail but at a quick look the Intel did better with less cores , I am not trying to make Intel look better just trying to justify if switching to AMD will be worth it as you still have to buy expensive CPUs like ryzen to get good performance
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AMD are hit too
http://bgr.com/2018/01/03/intel-security-flaw-also-arm-amd-macos-already-patched/
The only thing different looks like Intel are doing something about it and AMD has not responded yet
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AMD CPUs are impacted by this just as much as Intel CPUs.
Not true
No, completely true. First, you trimmed off one heck of a lot of context that's really important:
It's also worth pointing out that this isn't a kernel-specific issue, and that side channel attacks can impact any program that tries to isolate untrusted code. (For example, a browser running javascript.) The kernel mitigations don't fix all of those other programs–and AMD CPUs are impacted by this just as much as Intel CPUs.
What a lot of fanboys seem to be missing in their urgency to have an intel bonfire is that this is about a class of vulnerabilities, not a specific vulnerability. AMD processors seem at this point to not be vulnerable to one particular mode of attack, but are vulnerable to other modes of attack. And I guarantee that this area of research will get a lot more attention, and there will be other exploit vectors discovered. Side channel attacks have simply not been something that commodity CPU vendors have worried about, so to some degree finding them is like shooting fish in a barrel. (This is true of all the vendors, not just intel.) "Meltdown" is getting most of the press (that which isn't completely confused about the various attack vectors) and is the biggest PITA for shared infrastructure providers, but "Spectre" is actually much harder to fix, and just as relevant to actual users who do things like browse the web. The most straightforward fixes involve giving up any hope of sandboxing potentially malicious code within a process and relying on process isolation instead–which will have a performance impact on everyone's web browsing.
And as long as we're talking about AMD, they really botched up the disclosure timeline by publicly asserting that they weren't vulnerable to certain kinds of cache timing attacks in the context of the linux kpti patches...people are going to think twice before trusting AMD to keep their mouths shut in the future.
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Can you please elaborate a little bit this, so we can understand what you mean? Especially the "most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context ".
The whole pfSense runs as root, including the web interface afaik…My understanding of this is that one application running on the OS would be able to improperly read memory used by other applications. Obviously this is bad if some rogue app/script can pull sensitive data from other apps on a workstation. Also bad if one VM can read data from another. On a dedicated firewall, the OS is not going to be running untrusted apps. I don't see much of an attack vector on a firewall. I certainly wouldn't worry about pfSense until I had Hypervisors, servers, and end user workstations taken care of.
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Engineering question, if the Meltdown and Spectre kernel fixes reduces pfSense performance by 5% or more, is that prudent ?
If Meltdown and Spectre require malicious code running locally, all bets are off, and there are far easier methods to extract credentials.
Bottom line, are the Meltdown and Spectre fixes appropriate for an appliance like pfSense ?
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@lra:
Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Engineering question, if the Meltdown and Spectre kernel fixes reduces pfSense performance by 5% or more, is that prudent ?
If Meltdown and Spectre require malicious code running locally, all bets are off, and there are far easier methods to extract credentials.
Bottom line, are the Meltdown and Spectre fixes appropriate for an appliance like pfSense ?
From what I can tell both Meltdown and Spectre use very similar methodologies to gain access to L1 cache memory. Looks like they take advantage of speculative out-of-order features, a form of execution parallelism through predictive execution, to access L1 cache by attempting to create an out-of-order execution on one core while another core processes a prior instruction that is meant to cause an exception. It then produces a race-condition where it tries to access L1 cache from within the out-of-order sequence before the processor has time to terminate the original thread by retiring the whole set of instructions and clearing the L1 of memory and code. During this race condition, perhaps 200 clock cycles, it needs to determine if bits in memory are a 1 or a 0, the details which honestly elude me but seem to involve measuring the time caused by side-effecting the microarchitecture. Even after that it still needs to communicate that outside of the process then using the exception-handling to communicate/raise a couple of registers outside of that thread to the process where it can display the contents to the attacker.
I haven't seen any working meltdown/spectre example code that can get kernel data but a couple that successfully get user-mode memory pages. I'd find it prudent to patch on shared-infrastructure where resources aren't shared at the VM level but at the container level. For pfSense, an attacker would need to have root/wheel access as a prerequisite to the machine, so they wouldn't be needing to compile/inject cache-exploiting code into other processes to see their memory in the first place. For that reason it means it is extremely unlikely to be a primary attack vector on a firewall system.
As for CPU usage, it's difficult to tell what the performance impact will be. PostgreSQL suggests somewhere between 17% ~ 23%. I think it's fairly significant but for a firewall I don't know if anyone will notice. Our pfSense setup uses perhaps 5% ~ 10% CPU performance, so 23% I don't think will be recognizable … but who knows, maybe it'll affect traffic-shaping. For hypervisors I could see the performance impact being noticeable when systems are at or near computing capacity.
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I just came across this:
http://www.pcgamer.com/intel-ceo-sold-39-million-in-company-shares-prior-to-disclosure-of-cpu-security-flaws/ -
This is not a joke anymore. Really.
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Can you please elaborate a little bit this, so we can understand what you mean? Especially the "most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context ".
The whole pfSense runs as root, including the web interface afaik…@lra:
Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Engineering question, if the Meltdown and Spectre kernel fixes reduces pfSense performance by 5% or more, is that prudent ?
If Meltdown and Spectre require malicious code running locally, all bets are off, and there are far easier methods to extract credentials.
Bottom line, are the Meltdown and Spectre fixes appropriate for an appliance like pfSense ?
We will know more information once there's a fix in place so I would rather not speculate now. Once the fix is ready, it will be available in snapshots.
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Could you please elaborate/simplify to understand more about this statement?
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https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/issues/142
::)
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Could you please elaborate/simplify to understand more about this statement?
The vulnerabilities do not affect pfSense in a usual configuration where there are no local users that could have local execution privileges for untrusted code.
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A "Quantum of Solace" for me in that statement - (To coin a phrase)
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
This makes sense for PFSense itself, but what about packages like Snort and Suricata that actively evaluate untrusted and malicious code all the time?
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This post is deleted! -
@lra:
Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Engineering question, if the Meltdown and Spectre kernel fixes reduces pfSense performance by 5% or more, is that prudent ?
If Meltdown and Spectre require malicious code running locally, all bets are off, and there are far easier methods to extract credentials.
Bottom line, are the Meltdown and Spectre fixes appropriate for an appliance like pfSense ?
We will know more information once there's a fix in place so I would rather not speculate now. Once the fix is ready, it will be available in snapshots.
For Reference …
DragonFlyBSD Lands Fixes For Meltdown Vulnerability
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DragonFly-Meltdown-Fixed"... system call performance is reduced, similar to Linux, when the isolation is enabled. DragonFly reports that system calls go from about 100ns to ~350ns. In typcial workloads they say you should "not lose more than 5% performance or so. System-call heavy and interrupt-heavy workloads (network, database, high-speed storage, etc) can lose a lot more performance."
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
This makes sense for PFSense itself, but what about packages like Snort and Suricata that actively evaluate untrusted and malicious code all the time?
No they don't, what they do is they analyze patterns in the incoming and outgoing connections on both the IP headers and the data payload level and then make decisions based on rules if there is an active threat going on. None of their operations involve an actual execution of untrusted program code, it would be just plain crazy if such thing was allowed.
